How do children overcome hazardous experiences to succeed in life? What can be done to protect young people at risk from trauma, war, disasters, and other adversities? Learn about the importance of fostering resilience in children at risk.
During this course, participants will: learn how trauma can affect children and the systems they depend on, gain insight into core concepts, research methods and lessons learned in last 50 years of resilience research, learn how research is being applied in the real world through interventions that promote resilience, and engage in discussions with others who are working with children at risk around the world
Participants are welcome to take the MOOC at no cost or to register for a Course Certificate ($49). Those who register and earn a Course Certificate from Coursera also are eligible to sign up for continuing education clock hours through the University of Minnesota.
Participants can earn 10 clock hours of continuing education credit (added cost $99) from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. Go here http://z.umn.edu/1a5q to register for continuing education clock hours for completing this course.

This module focuses on what has been learned from research on children who experience disasters, including the effects on children and patterns of recovery. Participants will watch a video interview with an expert on children in disaster and additional videos on damage and recovery following the F5 Joplin tornado. Participants will also complete a survey on disaster experiences.

Enseigné par

Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LP

Regents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development

Transcription

In this segment we're going to talk about resilience and recovery in the aftermath of a disaster. We'll talk about pathways, you've, you've heard about that before. And also about what predicts resilience in the context of disaster and about long term recovery. Let's start with this graph. You've seen graphs like this before. This shows the different pathways and different responses to disaster that you might see. Here's the onset of the disaster. And in this graph we're, we're seeing functioning over here on this axis with good functioning toward the top, doing okay in the middle. And functioning poorly down low. And what you can see here is that after a disaster people show different kinds of patterns. And pattern A is often called the stress resistance pattern as you may recall. And here we see people may have a response, but they do pretty well all the way along aft, in the aftermath of the disaster. Pattern B is probably more common. Often people will have a, a bigger reaction to a very severe disaster. But then they recover a, as usually as conditions improve following the disaster. And then some people show pattern C which is a post traumatic growth pattern. They actually function better after this challenge. And then you have pattern D, which shows somebody who's affected badly by a disaster, but has not shown recovery as yet. Perhaps they'll recover in the future, we don't know why in this kind of diagram. This is what we see, how we portray, response with good outcomes at the top. But often as you've seen, we are measuring symptoms, negative responses to disasters. And if you think about those same patterns, if you're measuring symptoms, it would look more like this. So, you know sympt, low symptoms is good. Here's that stress-resistant pattern. They're showing low symptoms after the disaster has occurred, before and after. And then you see pattern B here, they're doing fine and then the disaster happens and they show some symptoms for a while and then those symptoms resolve and they get better, they show the recovery pattern here. And then here's the pattern of somebody who shows a response to the disaster which occurs here, and then they haven't yet recuperated or recovered from the effects of that disaster. One of the difficulties we have when we do research on disaster is as I mentioned before we don't often have any measures of what was happening before. And research often begins after the disaster has happened, maybe about this point in time. And then you would be looking at patterns from here on out. And I wanted to show you an example of this from Hurricane Andrew. This hurricane occurred in 1992, but the data were recently reanalyzed in order to study these patterns over time. They had collected this kind of data, but they used new modern statistical techniques to study these patterns. And what you could see in this picture is, they're measuring post-traumatic symptoms having high scores means that you have a lot of symptoms in the aftermath of this hurricane. And anything up here in this range is at the clinical level, the level you see if somebody really needs help and needs a clinical referral. And what they've plotted here are three different patterns. These people in the black line were the most affected, these children. And they, what they studied were children in third to fifth grade who were around the ages of eight to 11 years old. The blue line is our children who were, had showed some effect and they're now recovering over time out to ten months after this particular trauma. And then you have this group marked in green who look more like the stress resistance pattern. They have fairly low symptoms and have held a steady course. We don't know how these children were doing before Hurricane Andrew, but they're showing different kinds of responses. There's been a lot of research trying to understand what predicts better recovery or good outcomes after a disaster. And, some of them you might well imagine. Children whose needs are met do better. People have needs for basic things like clean water and food and medical care after disasters. And it's important that children receive that, those basic necessities. They need also safety and security. And what gives children the most safe, sense of safety and security, is to be with the people they are attached to. Their family and other people that are their caregivers and the people they're connected to. So, family resilience really matters. We, there's more and more research showing that how well a family is doing after a disaster has an impact on how well a child is doing. And one of the ways we can think about helping children is to help their families recover after a disaster because then the family can help the child. Another important lesson learned from research on disaster with children is that they need to have normal routines restored. And this means, normal family routines. eating, bedtime rituals, that sort of thing. They need the routines of their going to their childcare center or for older children, going to school. And they need opportunities to play and do fun things and be children. Children as well as adults also need to be able to do the cultural and religious practices that give them a sense of security and familiarity in their own culture and society. I do want to emphasize that school is extremely important for children. And for those of you who have experienced a disaster, often one of the most important symbols that life is getting back to normal is when school starts up again. And you can see this in the story of the Joplin public schools, which were so destroyed and damaged by that huge tornado. It was really important to the people of this community that they start school up as soon as they could and that they built a nice new school. This is a drawing of the, the new school that they built. And so on. Because this gives people, adults as well as children, a feeling that life is getting back to normal. In terms of long term recovery, most people, children and adults, will recover, over the long term, from disaster experiences. We know this from long term studies of survivors of historical disasters. And we are now following many people in modern times who are recovering from more recent disasters. Most people will do well over time, some will suffer long term consequences or continue to have some symptoms of trauma. Those people are usually the, those who are more affected at the time, or who had greater loss at the time that altered their life. But by and large, most people show a lot of resilience, even to very severe disasters. And the biggest threats to recovery for children, are when they lose their family, or they lose the care that they need, when they lose everything that's familiar to them. And if they are, harmed in some way. They're injured, or affected physically, as well as mentally by the disaster experience itself. And of course, the other big factor that could continue to have have effect, or make life worse, is if they continue to experience trauma either in the family, or they live in an area where there's another disaster that happens. There are regions of the world that are prone to disasters because of their location or their, because of an ongoing war. And those take a toll on the lives of children. In the next segment, we're going to talk about interventions that have, and the research that's been done to try to figure out what could we do to help children after disasters to foster resilience.